Life of the Mind
New Releases

Monica Youn ’93, lecturer in creative writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts, explores fertility in a new collection of poetry, Blackacre (Graywolf Press). Youn plays upon the term Blackacre, the legal notion of a hypothetical estate, to explore what is bequeathed to us — land, art, heritage, body, destiny — and how imagination can transform them all.

Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor of the Humanities, translates into English a comprehensive collection of Italy’s most beloved living poet in Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini (Princeton University Press). The collection contains the original Italian on the facing pages, explanatory notes, and 50 years’ worth of Merini’s work.

In Equal Recognition: Moral Foundations of Minority Rights (Princeton University Press), Alan Patten, professor of politics, examines multiculturalism by developing a new ethical defense of minority rights. Patten delves into several important contexts in which minority rights have been considered, including debates about language rights and immigrant integration.